How Did Denny Hastert Get Rich Enough to Pay Millions to an Accuser?

By John Fund — May 31, 2015

http://www.nationalreview.com/

Denny Hastert — the former House speaker now indicted for violating regulations on bank withdrawals that were originally meant to snare drug dealers — was a man of integrity according to his former House colleagues.

By the sketchy standards of Illinois politics, that might well have been true. But his fall from grace should prompt other questions about how a former high-school teacher who held elective office from 1981 to 2007 could leave Congress with a fortune estimated at $4 million to $17 million. When he entered Congress in 1987, he was worth at most $275,000. Hastert was the beneficiary of very lucky land deals while in Congress; and since leaving office, he has earned more than $2 million a year as a lobbyist. That helps explain how he could agree to pay $3.5 million to a former student to cover up an ancient sex-abuse scandal.

I saw him become passionate only once, when he defended earmarks.

Denny Hastert used to visit the Wall Street Journal, where I worked while he was the speaker. He was a bland, utterly conventional supporter of the status quo; his idea of reform was to squelch anyone who disturbed Congress’s usual way of doing business. I saw him become passionate only once, when he defended earmarks — the special projects such as Alaska’s “Bridge to Nowhere” that members dropped at the last minute into conference reports, deliberately leaving no time to debate or amend them. Earmarks reached the staggering level of 15,000 in 2005, and their stench helped cost the GOP control of Congress the next year.

But Hastert was unbowed. “Who knows best where to put a bridge or a highway or a red light in his district?” I recall him bellowing. I responded that the Illinois Department of Transportation came to mind, and we then agreed to disagree.

RELATED: No Time for Hillary Scandals — Because Every Reporter Everywhere Is Covering the Dennis Hastert Indictment

It wasn’t long after that the Sunlight Foundation reported on just how much Hastert thought himself qualified to steer earmarks back home. The foundation found that Hastert had used a secret trust to join with others and invest in farm land near the proposed route of a new road called the Prairie Parkway. He then helped secure a $207 million earmark for the road. The land, approximately 138 acres, was bought for about $2.1 million in 2004 and later sold for almost $5 million, or a profit of 140 percent. Local land records and congressional disclosure forms never identified Hastert as the co-owner of any of the land in the trust. Hastert turned a $1.3 million investment (his portion of the land holdings) into a $1.8 million profit in less than two years.

Hastert claimed at the time that the land deals had nothing to do with the federal earmark he had secured. “I owned land and I sold it, like millions of people do every day,” he told the Washington Post. Or, as George Washington Plunkitt, the former Tammany Hall leader in New York, once said of someone who made a killing in local land that later became part of a lucrative subway development: “He saw his opportunities and he took ’em.” Plunkitt called such “opportunities” a form of “honest graft.”

It’s no surprise that so many of our “public servants,” by the time they leave office, have accrued enough wealth to act like lords of the manor.

With a federal government so big and so awash in money that anything under $100,000 is routinely considered a rounding error, it’s no surprise that so many of our “public servants,” by the time they leave office, have accrued enough wealth to act like lords of the manor. Take another congressional leader, retiring Senate minority leader Harry Reid, who entered Congress the same year Hastert did and who also has become, while a “public servant,” a millionaire worth between $3 million and $10 million. In his last re-election campaign, Reid explained his wealth by saying, “I did a very good job investing.”

Perhaps, but using some unusual methods. In 2012, Betsy Woodruff reported for National Review Online:

In 2004, the senator made $700,000 off a land deal that was, to say the least, unorthodox. It started in 1998 when he bought a parcel of land with attorney Jay Brown, a close friend whose name has surfaced multiple times in organized-crime investigations and whom one retired FBI agent described as “always a person of interest.” Three years after the purchase, Reid transferred his portion of the property to Patrick Lane LLC, a holding company Brown controlled. But Reid kept putting the property on his financial disclosures, and when the company sold it in 2004, he profited from the deal — a deal on land that he didn’t technically own and that had nearly tripled in value in six years.

Like Hastert, Reid was a king of the congressional earmark process before it was largely shut down amid public outcry in 2011. During the heyday of earmarks, the watchdog group Judicial Watch reported that Reid

sponsored at least $47 million in earmarks that directly benefitted organizations with close ties to one of his sons, Key Reid. . . .
More recently Reid abused his authority to pressure the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to expedite a $115 million foreign-investor visa deal critical to his son’s casino client. Reid got the DHS to override agency procedures to rush through hundreds of visa applications from foreign nationals who helped fund a Las Vegas hotel and casino that hired Rory Reid to provide legal representation for the project.

All of this self-dealing is a major reason that Americans hold Congress in such low esteem today. It helps explain why GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina is bringing audiences to their feet when she cites a recent Rasmussen Reports poll: It’s sad, she says that “82 percent of the American people now believe that we have a professional political class that is more focused on preserving its power and privilege than it is on doing the people’s work.” 

RELATED: What Kind of Scandal Would Force Hillary to Withdraw Her Candidacy?

Denny Hastert is now in the clutches of federal prosecutors, and Harry Reid is riding off into the sunset, his misbegotten fortunes intact. But the current occupants are still tarred by their actions. Public cynicism about our elected officials continues to increase. A contributing factor is that when prosecutors do finally act, it’s too often to prosecute the likes of Dennis Hastert for falling into “a financial speed trap,” as David Smith, the former federal prosecutor who once managed asset-forfeiture litigation for the Department of Justice, recently described Hastert’s indictment. Meanwhile, Paul Ryan, the House Ways and Means chairman, has just written the Justice Department asking why it has not prosecuted anyone involved in the two-year old IRS scandal over the targeting of conservative nonprofit groups, despite abundant evidence of flagrant abuse. Ryan isn’t expecting a timely or responsive answer.

When the Founders established a government they hoped would be guided by a blind Justice, I doubt they had in mind our current situation — in which our Justice Department chooses to be blind to abuses.

— John Fund is national-affairs correspondent for National Review Online.

Why doctors quit

By Charles Krauthammer
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
May 28, 2015

Pediatrician Tom Sullivan uses the raised hand to caution a three-year-old patient to keep her hands off the computer he uses to keep a medical record of her visit at the Lorton office of All Pediatrics. (Dayna Smith/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST)

About a decade ago, a doctor friend was lamenting the increasingly frustrating conditions of clinical practice. “How did you know to get out of medicine in 1978?” he asked with a smile.

“I didn’t,” I replied. “I had no idea what was coming. I just felt I’d chosen the wrong vocation.”

I was reminded of this exchange upon receiving my med-school class’s 40th-reunion report and reading some of the entries. In general, my classmates felt fulfilled by family, friends and the considerable achievements of their professional lives. But there was an undercurrent of deep disappointment, almost demoralization, with what medical practice had become.

The complaint was not financial but vocational — an incessant interference with their work, a deep erosion of their autonomy and authority, a transformation from physician to “provider.”

As one of them wrote, “My colleagues who have already left practice all say they still love patient care, being a doctor. They just couldn’t stand everything else.” By which he meant “a never-ending attack on the profession from government, insurance companies, and lawyers . . . progressively intrusive and usually unproductive rules and regulations,” topped by an electronic health records (EHR) mandate that produces nothing more than “billing and legal documents” — and degraded medicine.

I hear this everywhere. Virtually every doctor and doctors’ group I speak to cites the same litany, with particular bitterness about the EHR mandate. As another classmate wrote, “The introduction of the electronic medical record into our office has created so much more need for documentation that I can only see about three-quarters of the patients I could before, and has prompted me to seriously consider leaving for the first time.”

You may have zero sympathy for doctors, but think about the extraordinary loss to society — and maybe to you, one day — of driving away 40 years of irreplaceable clinical experience.

And for what? The newly elected Barack Obama told the nation in 2009 that “it just won’t save billions of dollars” — $77 billion a year, promised the administration — “and thousands of jobs, it will save lives.” He then threw a cool $27 billion at going paperless by 2015.

It’s 2015 and what have we achieved? The $27 billion is gone, of course. The $77 billion in savings became a joke. Indeed, reported the Health and Human Services inspector general in 2014, “EHR technology can make it easier to commit fraud,” as in Medicare fraud, the copy-and-paste function allowing the instant filling of vast data fields, facilitating billing inflation.

That’s just the beginning of the losses. Consider the myriad small practices that, facing ruinous transition costs in equipment, software, training and time, have closed shop, gone bankrupt or been swallowed by some larger entity.

This hardly stays the long arm of the health-care police, however. As of Jan. 1, 2015, if you haven’t gone electronic, your Medicare payments will be cut, by 1 percent this year, rising to 3 percent (potentially 5 percent) in subsequent years.

Then there is the toll on doctors’ time and patient care. One study in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine found that emergency-room doctors spend 43 percent of their time entering electronic records information, 28 percent with patients. Another study found that family-practice physicians spend on average 48 minutes a day just entering clinical data.

Forget the numbers. Think just of your own doctor’s visits, of how much less listening, examining, even eye contact goes on, given the need for scrolling, clicking and box checking.

The geniuses who rammed this through undoubtedly thought they were rationalizing health care. After all, banking went electronic. Why not medicine?

Because banks deal with nothing but data. They don’t listen to your heart or examine your groin. Clicking boxes on an endless electronic form turns the patient into a data machine and cancels out the subtlety of a doctor’s unique feel and judgment.

Why did all this happen? Because liberals in a hurry refuse to trust the self-interested wisdom of individual practitioners, who were already adopting EHR on their own, but gradually, organically, as the technology became ripe and the costs tolerable. Instead, Washington picked a date out of a hat and decreed: Digital by 2015.

As with other such arbitrary arrogance, the results are not pretty. EHR is health care’s Solyndra. Many, no doubt, feasted nicely on the $27 billion, but the rest is waste: money squandered, patients neglected, good physicians demoralized.

Like my old classmates who signed up for patient care — which they still love — and now do data entry.

Read more from Charles Krauthammer’s archive, follow him on Twitter orsubscribe to his updates on Facebook.

Read more about this topic:

Charles Krauthammer: The health-care myths we live by

Dan Morhaim: America’s electronic medical records mess

The Post’s View: The rush to digitize patient records has not cut costs

Robert J. Samuelson: Taming the health-care monster?

Today's Tune: Brandon Flowers - Can't Deny My Love

The Killers’ Brandon Flowers aims deep in latest solo album

By Mikael Wood Los Angeles Times (TNS)

http://www.heraldextra.com/

May 27, 2015

Here’s one way to win Brandon Flowers’ confidence: Tell him you like a song of his that nobody else likes.

That’s what Ariel Rechtshaid did when the Killers frontman, on the hunt for a producer for his second solo album, played Rechtshaid a demo of “Still Want You,” which Flowers had originally written for his main band’s 2012 record “Battle Born.”

“I was kind of reluctant to play it,” the singer recalled recently, adding that “Still Want You” — a deeply earnest tune about holding on to love in the face of “climate change” and “nuclear distress” — had been received less than warmly by those who’d heard it, including his Killers bandmates. “But Ariel loved it right away.”

For Flowers, 33, that was a sign that the producer known for his inventive work with Vampire Weekend and the Los Angeles sister trio Haim was the right guy to partner with for his new album, “The Desired Effect,” no small thing given that Rechtshaid came from outside Flowers’ trusted circle. With the Killers and on his 2010 solo debut, “Flamingo,” the singer has collaborated with the likes of Daniel Lanois, Flood and Steve Lillywhite, all high-profile veterans of U2’s late-‘80s/early-'90s era.

The change in personnel inspired a welcome creative shift: Rather than build on Flowers’ reputation for sweeping, ultra-dramatic arena rock, “The Desired Effect” (which came out May 18) goes smaller and more personal, with weirder, funkier arrangements and lyrics that reflect his upbringing as a Mormon in Las Vegas and his life as the married father of three young children.

“I think Brandon had reached a natural arc in what he was doing and needed something different,” said Rechtshaid. “My deal was, ‘Let’s try to make the world know who you really are.’ ”

Over a tight groove punctuated by horns in opener “Dreams Come True,” Flowers describes being tantalized as a kid by “promises and visions of a country unseen.” The winsome “Lonely Town” considers “life without you around.” And then there’s “The Way It’s Always Been,” in which the singer ponders the constant churn of renewal that defines his hometown as a minimal machine beat keeping time.

“It’s not as grandiose as some of the stuff I’ve gone for before,” the singer said in West Hollywood before an appearance on “The Late Late Show With James Corden.” Which isn’t to say that he and Rechtshaid, who split recording sessions between L.A. and Las Vegas, resisted the urge to follow their impulses.

Among the musicians featured on the album are Kenny Aronoff, known for his drumming on John Mellencamp’s early-'80s hits, and pianist Bruce Hornsby, who lends his signature sound to two tracks.

In the studio, Rechtshaid said, he and Flowers found themselves “going for a Hornsby vibe” but they couldn’t quite get there on their own. “So we were like, ‘Why not just reach out to him?’ ”

“In my experience it’s pretty bulletproof, just calling people,” said Flowers, who added that he employed the same approach to get Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys to appear on “I Can Change.” “You don’t think they’re going to say yes. Ever. But I think they appreciate that there are people who admire their work.”

Record-nerd catnip though they may be, these cameos weren’t about exploiting name brands, Rechtshaid insisted, but attaining a level of sonic legitimacy to match the “realness” of Flowers’ lyrics. “I didn’t want an imitation,” said the producer, and indeed there’s a specificity to many of the sounds on “The Desired Effect” that elevates the music above the shallow '80s-pop pastiche it might’ve been.

When Hornsby’s distinctive piano ripples through “Between Me and You,” which also features Tony Levin on the bass-like Chapman stick, it’s not taking you out of the moment; it’s boosting the emotion of a song about a family man’s struggle to stay connected.

One part of that struggle of course is the touring commitments that will keep Flowers away from home until the fall. “Flamingo” performed less successfully than many expected, as did the Killers’ “Battle Born,” which might be why Flowers seems to be stepping on the gas behind “The Desired Effect.” “I feel like I’m going for it a little bit more,” he said, citing a promotional push that helped drive the album to the top 10 of the iTunes chart.

For an artist famous for conveying a larger-than-life aesthetic, Flowers is remarkably unruffled by the challenge of adapting the album’s relatively intimate songs to the stage.

“A good song is a good song, and a small song can become a big song,” he said. “I’m so used to having these giant choruses and kind of going for it. But I feel like something like ‘Lonely Town’ could translate in a big arena.”

Then again, the Brandon Flowers road show is considerably more compact than the Killers’. In recent years the band has played Staples Center and the Hollywood Bowl, but when Flowers’ solo tour reaches L.A. in September, he’ll be at the Wiltern.

“Yeah, that’s hard on my ego,” he said with a laugh. “No, it’s fine. It wasn’t that long ago that the Killers were in clubs. I like big stages, it’s true — I like to spread my wings.

“But it’s cool,” he added. “I mean, these shows aren’t that small.”

Rush Limbaugh as a Silencing Trigger

Instead of talking about Kirsten Powers’s new book, NPR goes down a rabbit hole.

By Kathryn Jean Lopez — May 28, 2015

http://www.nationalreview.com/

Screen shot: May 6, 2015

Kirsten Powers has done a public service with her new book The Silencing: How the Left Is Killing Free Speech, a bit of a thankless task if Twitter is any indication.

Still, Mary Eberstadt has noted the treasure that it is. Peggy Noonan has as well. So has Kathleen Parker. I wrote about it here the other day.

And Rush Limbaugh has recommended it. Which, in many ways, changes everything. His word of recommendation and praise can be a great gift to authors.

On his show the other day, Rush said:

Now, she’s still a lib, proudly says so, but as I say, she’s not rock-ribbed with this. And many times, in fact, on a Fox show here or there — you know, occasionally, ladies and gentlemen, I find myself involved in a controversial affair. Doesn’t happen a whole lot, but sometimes I do, and on many of those occasions, Kirsten, using her instincts, has refused to join the chorus in whatever the criticism of me is. And she’s been right on those occasions.  

I thought writing this book was a gutsy thing for her to do because it’s not like somebody like me writing a book describing how the Left tries to silence people. I mean, she goes after ’em, folks. This is not a soft-pedaled little commentary or analysis on theory. She goes after these people with explicit, undeniable examples of how people on the left are literally trying to deny average, ordinary Americans access to the First Amendment.  

They are literally trying to destroy people. And as a liberal, it bothers her. She is the old classical liberal, I think is the term. An old classical liberal is not what a liberal is today. Liberal today means extreme, fascist, statist, intolerant, full-fledged, almost Stalinist type person. And it bothers her. She has written about it complete with examples, and because she comes from the left doing this, she has become this immense target of these people. I don’t know that she was prepared for it. She said she was, but I don’t know that anybody is.

And then he made a prediction:

So here comes Kirsten Powers, an appreciated and endowed, accepted ranking member of the Left calling them out. And so now they’ve gotta destroy her. She’s no different than if she were me, as far as they are concerned. They used to like her, they used to appreciate her, and some still do, but she’s got to be shut up. 

And then, while on National Public Radio, Powers found herself in what became a debate about Rush Limbaugh and his purported racism, for criticizing President Obama.

This came just after she talked about how some topic — like marriage — is made “radioactive” and becomes a “conversation stopper” instead of a “starter.”

RELATED: Kirsten Powers: A Profile in Courage

Rush Limbaugh as a topic himself is frequently used as a bludgeon for intimidation and silencing, in the fashion that she chronicles in her book.

After this experience, Powers may just wind up with a new chapter for the paperback, dedicated to Rush Limbaugh.

Rush Limbaugh is, in myriad ways, a gift — and not just to authors with books to sell. He is a man of intense gratitude and generosity and one of the great communicators of our day. If you’ve listened to him for any extensive amount of time, as many of us have, you know he communicates principles with clarity and wit and a depth of understanding. Everyone knows he talks but he is also a voracious reader and listener — which takes some humility, which, yes, even the man who for almost 30 years has declared on his show that he has half his brain tied behind his back just to make it fair, has — who frequently holds up more good to more people in one hour of his three-hour show than many of us can do in our entire lives. Rarely in news and commentary about him does the man in full appear.

Rush Limbaugh as a topic himself is frequently used as a bludgeon for intimidation and silencing.

And still on the air he is. And still being used by many — including quite well-intentioned people who believe what is said about him — to distract from the preponderance of Davids who are being crushed by a Goliath masquerading as supreme benevolence.

I love something a wounded veteran at National Review’s 50th-anniversary party (our beloved WFB was still with us) told him — Mark Levin points to it in his book, Rescuing Sprite: “We all have our roles.” Rush was embarrassed that this self-sacrificing American without an arm was grateful to him. But the Marine spoke a truth we could all afford to hear and appreciate, not to fill us with pride, but to make us more humble: to trust that if we pray, if we labor, if we encourage the better angels, we can do some good in the world, as maddening and confusing and heartbreaking as it can be.

I do hope that both people who do and people who do not watch Fox News and listen to Rush Limbaugh buy The Silencing. In gratitude. In openness. In a desire for something better in our politics and in our conversations — on NPR and in daily life.

And I’d hope that anyone with a media platform — especially on the Left — might take her book under consideration and cover the suppression of free speech, instead of giving into your temptation to be distracted. We all have our roles — and styles, temperaments, platforms — and may we all use them to do some good. Just like Rush Limbaugh. Just like Kirsten Powers.

– Kathryn Jean Lopez is senior fellow at the National Review Institute and editor-at-large at National Review Online.

Confidential Meeting Seeks to Sway Synod to Accept Same-Sex Unions

Around 50 participants, including bishops, theologians and media representatives, took part in the gathering, held at the Pontifical Gregorian University.


By Edward Pentin
http://www.ncregister.com/
May 26, 2015


Pontifical Gregorian University

ROME — A one-day study meeting — open only to a select group of individuals — took place at the Pontifical Gregorian University on Monday with the aim of urging “pastoral innovations” at the upcoming Synod of Bishops on the Family in October.

Around 50 participants, including bishops, theologians and media representatives, took part in the gathering, at the invitation of the presidents of the bishops’ conferences of Germany, Switzerland and France — Cardinal Reinhard Marx, Bishop Markus Büchel and Archbishop Georges Pontier.

One of the key topics discussed at the closed-door meeting was how the Church could better welcome those in stable same-sex unions, and reportedly “no one” opposed such unions being recognized as valid by the Church.

Participants also spoke of the need to “develop” the Church’s teaching on human sexuality and called not for a theology of the body, as famously taught by St. John Paul II, but the development of a “theology of love.”

One Swiss priest discussed the “importance of the human sex drive,” while another participant, talking about holy Communion for remarried divorcees, asked: “How can we deny it, as though it were a punishment for the people who have failed and found a new partner with whom to start a new life?”

Marco Ansaldo, a reporter for the Italian daily newspaper La Repubblica, who was present at the meeting, said the words seemed “revolutionary, uttered by clergymen.”

French Biblicist and Ratzinger Prize-winner Anne-Marie Pelletier praised the dialogue that took place between theologians and bishops as a “real sign of the times.” According to La Stampa, another Italian daily newspaper, Pelletier said the Church needs to enter into “a dynamic of mutual listening,” in which the magisterium continues to guide consciences, but she believes it can only effectively do so if it “echoes the words of the baptized.” 

The meeting took the “risk of the new, in fidelity with Christ,” she claimed. The article also quoted a participant as saying the synod would be a “failure” if it simply continued to affirm what the Church has always taught.

The closed-door meeting, masterminded by the German bishops’ conference under the leadership of Cardinal Marx, was first proposed at the annual meeting of the heads of the three bishops’ conferences, held in January in Marseille, France.

The study day took place just days after the people of Ireland voted in a referendum in support of same-sex “marriage” and on the same day as the Ordinary Council of the Synod of Bishops met in Rome. Some observers did not see the timing as a coincidence.

The synod council has been drawing up the instrumentum laboris (working document) for the October synod on the family. Integrated into the document will be the responses of a questionnaire sent to laity around the world. Those responses, particularly from Switzerland and Germany, appeared to be overwhelmingly in favor of the Church adapting her teachings to the secular world.

Why the Lack of Publicity?

No one would say why the study day was held in confidence. So secret was the meeting that even prominent Jesuits at the Gregorian were completely unaware of it. The Register learned about it when Jean-Marie Guénois leaked the information in a story in Le Figaro.

Speaking to the Register as he left the meeting, Cardinal Marx insisted the study day wasn’t secret. But he became irritated when pressed about why it wasn’t advertised, saying he had simply come to Rome in a “private capacity” and that he had every right to do so. Close to Pope Francis and part of his nine-member council of cardinals, the cardinal is known to be especially eager to reform the Church’s approach to homosexuals. During his Pentecost homily last Sunday, Cardinal Marx called for a “welcoming culture” in the Church for homosexuals, saying it’s “not the differences that count, but what unites us.”

Cardinal Marx is also not alone, among those attending the meeting, in pushing for radical changes to the Church’s life. The head of the Swiss bishops, Bishop Büchel of St. Gallen, has spoken openly in favor of women’s ordination, saying in 2011 that the Church should “pray that the Holy Spirit enables us to read the signs of the times.” Archbishop Pontier, head of the French bishops, is also known to have heterodox leanings.

The meeting’s organizers were unwilling to disclose the names of everyone who took part, but the Register has obtained a full list of participants. They included Jesuit Father Hans Langendörfer, general secretary of the German bishops’ conference, who has been the leading figure behind the recent reform of German Church labor laws to controversially allow remarried divorcees and homosexual couples to work in Church institutions.

Father Schockenhoff

Among the specialists present was Father Eberhard Schockenhoff, a moral theologian. Faithful German Catholics are particularly disturbed about the rise to prominence of Father Schockenhoff, who is understood to be the “mastermind” behind much of the challenge to settled Church teachings among the German episcopate and, by implication, at the synod on the family itself.

A prominent critic of Humanae Vitae (The Regulation of Birth), as well as a strong supporter of homosexual clergy and those pushing for reform in the area of sexual ethics, Father Schockenhoff is known to be the leading adviser of the German bishops in the run-up to the synod.

In 2010, he gave an interview in which he praised the permanence and solidarity shown in some same-sex relationships as “ethically valuable.” He urged that any assessment of homosexual acts “must take a back seat” on the grounds that the faithful are becoming “increasingly distant from the Church’s sexual morality,” which appears “unrealistic and hostile to them.” The Pope and the bishops should “take this seriously and not dismiss it as laxity,” he said.

Father Schockenhoff has also gone on record saying that moral theology must be “liberated from the natural law” and that conscience should be based on the “life experience of the faithful.” 

He has also insisted that the indissolubility of marriage is “not seriously called into question” by admitting remarried divorcees to holy Communion, writing a book to push his thesis in 2011 entitled "Opportunities for reconciliation?: The Church and the divorced and remarried". He has further proposed that the term the “official Church” should be done away with because of a growing gap between the institutional Church and the Church of the faithful. 

Also present was Marco Impagliazzo, president of the Sant’Egidio lay community; Jesuit Father Andreas Batlogg, professor of philosophy and theology and chief editor of the liberal periodical Stimmen der Zeit (Voices of the Time) — the journal has devoted its June issue to same-sex relationships and the synod — and Salesian Msgr. Markus Graulich, prelate auditor of the tribunal of the Roman Rota, one of very few Curial officials to attend. Some of those participating, such as Msgr. Graulich, took part in the previous synod.

Media Participation

Also noted were the large number of media representatives. Journalists from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, German broadcasters ZDF and ARD, the Italian daily La Repubblica and French-Catholic media La Croix and I-Media were also present. Their presence was “striking,” said one observer, who predicted they will be used to promote the agenda of the subject matter under discussion in the weeks leading up to the synod.

Monday’s meeting is just the latest attempt to subtly steer the upcoming synod in a direction opposed by many faithful Catholics. A statement on the study day released by the German bishops’ conference May 26 said there was a “reflection on biblical hermeneutics” — widely seen as code words for understanding the Bible differently from Tradition — and the need for a “reflection on a theology of love.”

Critics say this, too, is undermining Church teaching. By replacing the theology of the body with a “theology of love,” it creates an abstract interpretation that separates sex from procreation, thereby allowing forms of extramarital unions and same-sex attractions based simply on emotions rather than biological reality. Gone, say critics, is the Catholic view of marriage, which should be open to procreation.

The statement, which conspicuously failed to mention sin, ended by saying that “further discussion on the future of marriage and family is necessary and possible” and that it would be “enriched by a further, intensive theological reflection.”

This, too, is code for wanting a change in teaching, giving the impression that the doctrine in these areas is open to change. But for the Catholic Church, it is a settled issue.

“Imagine if the Church accepted homosexual relationships,” said one source speaking on condition of anonymity. “Ultimately, that is what these people want.”

Edward Pentin is the Register’s Rome correspondent.

Read more: http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/confidential-meeting-seeks-to-sway-synod-to-accept-same-sex-unions/#ixzz3bKlbbUyh